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Photoshop Experiment Blocky Brushes

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Yesterday was holiday and I took the day to do some Photoshop experiments. One of these experiments was inspired by the work of James White.

I’m a huge fan of the James White’s work, I love the way he plays with geometric elements and colors, it gives a retro feeling to the design but at the same time very modern. In an interview he told that he uses a Flash script to generate the vectors, then he does the rest of the job in Illustrator and Photoshop.

My workflow is rather simple. I wrote a very simple program in Flash that allowed me to create random assortments of shapes that I export to a postscript file so I can edit them in Illustrator. From there I will clean up the exports, add gradients, and use brushes to bend my shapes into unconventional combinations. Then I port them into Photoshop one by one where I can overlap them, lay down colors, lighting effects, textures, etc. James White.

After some time thinking, I sort of figure out a way to do that only in Photoshop. I’ve tried to simplified the process, the effect uses basically the Brush Engine and Layer Styles.

Below you can see the final result. I’ve written a tutorial showing the whole process. It will be published on PSDTUTS, probably next week.

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I'm a Brazilian product designer based in Oakland, California currently working for Google as a Staff Designer. I am also the founder of Abduzeedo, an award-winning digital publication about design and a personal project that has become the source of inspiration for millions of designers and enthusiasts.

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It has been quite a long time I've been thinking about creating a design with those very realistic shadows. This weekend I decided to give it a try. I started to think about what would be the best way, manually recreating that would be too much work. So I decided to try the 3D capabilities of Photoshop. It turned out to be the easiest and quickest way. The result was also very good.
So in this tutorial I will show you how to create a design with beautiful and dramatic shadows using the 3D in Photoshop CC.

In the past year I stopped writing tutorials and the main reason was that I thought they weren't relevant anymore given the copious amount of great websites out there. Also, I believe the audience of the blog has already matured and focused more on other areas of the design process such as ideations and the the process itself. The tools, as I always tried to emphasize, is the least important part of the process, but it's important to have command of them. As a good craftsman, knowing the best tool for each trade will save you a lot of time.

The last tutorial I wrote was back in January, it's been quite a long time and boy I missed it. I have been trying to organize myself to start playing more with not only Photoshop and Illustrator but also Sketch and other tools so I can share some new things with you. It's always a challenge due to my day to day job but it makes me feel so good when I finish something that went from my head to the final design in a very short period of time. Quite refreshing.

In this post I'm going to show you some of the tools that I use in my workflow when working with type in Photoshop.
Anti-Aliasing
The elephant in the room seems to be as good of a place as any to start this post. In previous versions of Photoshop (pre-CS6) selecting the type of anti-aliasing method to use came down to choosing the best from a bad bunch really. However, a few months ago Adobe introduced two new OS-native options in the anti-aliasing settings in Photoshop: “Mac” and “Mac LCD”.